Relevance-sensitive co-variation inferences of dependent indefinites

Abstract

A dependent indefinite triggers an obligatory distributive reading of the sentences it appears in. While previous literature agrees on the importance of co-variation (Brasoveanu and Farkas, 2011; Henderson, 2014; Kuhn, 2017; Guha, 2018; Law, 2022: a.o.), its behaviour under negation has received little attention (except Guha, 2018; Law, 2020: a.o.). In this paper, I present a novel observation that the co-variation inference of Turkish dependent indefinites is sensitive to contextual relevance in both positive and negative environments and argue that it is similar to the (non-)maximality inference of definite plurals. As a proof of concept, I offer an analysis with Plural Compositional DRT (Brasoveanu, 2007, 2008) in the trilateral setting, emulating Križ’s (2015; 2016) trivalent approach to (non-)maximality inferences.